The present disclosure relates to a battery pack including a carbon heater.
Recently, as technical development and demands for mobile devices have increased, demands for rechargeable secondary batteries as energy sources are rapidly increasing, and thus more researches on the secondary batteries are being carried out to cope with such diverse demands. Also, the secondary batteries have attracted considerable attention as power sources for an electric vehicle (EV), a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), and a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (Plug-In HEV), which have been proposed as solutions to air pollution and the like caused by existing gasoline and diesel vehicles that use fossil fuels.
Therefore, the electric vehicle (EV) capable of traveling using only a battery and the hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) using a battery in combination with an existing engine, have been developed, some of which have been commercialized. For the secondary batteries as power sources for EVs and HEVs, nickel metal hydride (Ni-MH) batteries are commonly used. However, recent researches on using lithium secondary batteries having high energy density, high discharge voltage, and output stability are being actively carried out, some of which have reached commercialization.
When such secondary batteries are used as a vehicle power, the secondary batteries are used in the form of a battery pack including a plurality of battery cells, a battery module, or a battery module assembly.
However, when a lithium secondary battery is used under a low temperature environment, a performance thereof is degraded due to voltage drop, and thus, more power is consumed in comparison with that consumed in an ordinary temperature environment.
Due to the above-described limitation, when an electric vehicle using a lithium secondary battery as a power source travels at a low temperature, performance degradation such as reduction in output and decrease in traveling distance of the electric vehicle occurs.
Thus, there is a great need for technologies that can fundamentally solve the above-described limitations.